It’s easy to forget that 10,000 years separate The Horus Heresy and the 41st Millennium of Warhammer 40,000, and that 10,000 years is quite a long time. Enough time for things to change considerably.

Forge World produce plenty of kits which show the heritage of units you’ll know from Warhammer 40,000 – like the early marks of Space Marine armour, and the fantastic Land Raider Armoured Proteus – or vehicles with a joint lineage to those that are well known in the armouries of the 41st Millennium – such as the Fire Raptor Gunship and Legion Glaive super heavy tank.

This new Mechanicum unit has recently shown up in the studio, and it has a lot in common with the venerable Blight Drone that has seen service in Chaos armies for many years.

This teaser may not seem like much but usually when Forge World shows a new or upcoming unit off like this it typically shows up either the same week or the next. This post also helps to make that connection between the Blight Drone and the Mechanicum Drone a lot stronger. While the two designs do share some design DNA you can clearly see that something probably happened to the Plague Drone in the Warp…It doesn’t look like whatever Papa Nurgle “Blessed” it with is going to just buff-out with a new coat of wax.

More Battle-Automata on the way for the Mechanicum – Johnny 5 is Alive!

I’ve put some void shields around the wallet. My last one got blasted by a reaver titan long ago.

aka_mythos

While there are strong visual similarities I think it’s important to note this new drone is larger than a blightdrone. The body of this new one is similar in size to its standard flight base while the blightdrone is on a standard 60mm base with a skimmer stem. This new one is almost 30-40mm wide in the body and almost 60mm longer.

Shiwan8

Look at the flight base. It’s the new monster oval (ie. smaller 90mm or even 75mm).

aka_mythos

It is smaller than the standard oval flyer base. It appears to be the 105mm by 70mm based on the size of the flight stem. If that base is 70mm wide, that would make the body ~70mm as opposed to the blightdrone where the body is only about 35mm; hence why I said 30-40mm difference in the width of the main body of each. Admittedly its probably closer to 50mm longer instead of the 60mm I said before but its hard to tell from a single angle.

Maybe its a newer smaller flight stem, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. For this to be close to the same size that’d have to be the 75mm by 46mm oval and the widest part of the flight stem would be 25mm wide instead of the standard 32mm.

Shiwan8

Dunno. The stem seems disproportionately thick compared to the pictures on GW site.

benn grimm

Looks very cool, though I think a few more grasping mechadendrites wouldn’t go amiss. I really like the havoc launchers on the flanks, definitely helps to tie it in with that early Imp vibe.

Alpharius

Bite your tongue or they will make it the garbage havoc missiles.

benn grimm

Lol, sorry dude, but they totally look like havocs. I will cross my fingers for cyclones though if it helps… 😉

It’d be cool to mount this on 4-6 legs and make a Dunecrawler style tank.

Emprah

Could be the design that the Dark Mechanicum based their plague drones upon. Though the jet-rotors are clearly in a very different place.

Alpharius

Why would the Dark Mechanicum base anything on science? The blight drone probably started its life as some horrid bile-spewing mega-slug, and some crazy Dark Mechanicum guy was like “I bet those things would be funny with a couple of propellers”. Boom, Blight Drone.

georgelabour

The dark mechanicum is well known for entertwining flesh with machinery, and then injecting elements of the infernal and aetheric into it.

Heck sometimes they just build a machine, plug a daemon in and then let it grow the squishy bits.

So it’s just as likely the originals were made on an assembly line that got possessed. That daemon possessed factory then began saying “feed me syemour” and as the DMs began feeding it people it began to poop out blight drones covered in ‘stuff’.

Also this version wouldn’t be defeated by a package of salt used to make Guardsmen rations taste like salt instead of…’stuff’.

jcdent

Blight drone always looked like a flying turd, but I guess that’s what Nurgle players like